


The Winter Wall

by kattahj



Category: Back Home - Michelle Magorian
Genre: Christmas, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 14:35:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kattahj/pseuds/kattahj
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The beautiful winter weather gives Rusty an idea for a Christmas present for her mother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Winter Wall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [suth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/suth/gifts).



Instead of presidents, Mount Rushmore had the heads of great British monarchs carved into it. Even in sleep, Rusty knew that this wasn't right, but she wanted this vacation to be the greatest, and so she kept a brave face, explaining to Skeet and Janey who each one was.

"That's Aethelstan, he was the first king of England, and that's Earwig... no, sorry, that's not his name, but something like that, I can't remember exactly."

The monarchs lasted forever and ever, and at one point Harry showed up and started arguing with her about Richard the Lionheart, who, Harry adamantly declared, wasn't the hero people claimeds.

When Charlie tugged at her hair and declared, “It's snowing!” she thought it was just the thing she needed to make this vacation a complete mess.

“It can't snow,” she grumped. “We're supposed to have a picnic.”

“Oh, but it is!” he said happily and crawled in under the covers. “It's snowing like _anything_. Won't you please wake up?”

His cold toes against her ankles were enough to bring her out of her dream, and she shuddered at the touch. “Brrr! Charlie!” She caught him in a warm hug. “You're a little snowflake all over!s”

Sitting up, still with Charlie in a hug, she looked out the window. It was a beautiful sight. None of that heavy sleet, or whipping little specks of ice that didn't quite earn the name of “hail” in her book. This was postcard variety snow: large, perfectly formed snowflakes that fell without a sound.

“Oh, wow,” she said.

“Will you make a snowman with me?” he asked.

“I can't right now, I've got to get to class.” Then she remembered that this wasn't exactly true, anymore. She hadn't missed many classes yet, only when she was sick, but she _could_ if she wanted to. She tried to recall her schedule. “Okay, this morning is music, and I don't want to miss that, but I could skip history and pick you up to make a snowman. Harry and Beth can fill me in later. What do you think?”

“Yes!”

Charlie was so enthusiastic that he leaped out of bed and started jumping around the room. Rusty didn't have quite that level of energy right after waking up, but she went up to the window, opened it, and stuck out her head, soaking up the cold winter air.

She was just in the process of turning over on her back to try to catch a snowflake in her mouth, when Peggy entered.

“Do take care,” she said, worried at her daughter's gymnastics. “Oh, look at your nightgown!” But she laughed after saying it.

Rusty straightened up and looked over her shoulder at her nightgown. It now had a broad, grubby streak across the back from the window sill.

“Oops,” she said. “But isn't it great?”

“It's marvellous, darling. And I'm so glad we got the roof mended in time. As lovely as this snow is, I'd hate to wake up one morning with it all in my bed.”

“A bed of snow,” Rusty said and smiled. “That's pretty romantic.”

“With snow blankets and a snow pillow and snow mattress,” Charlie said.

“Not very practical, though,” Peggy pointed out. “Come on, it's time we made some breakfast.”

Rusty put on some socks, against the cold of the floor, and they all went to the kitchen.

Peggy poured some oats into a saucepan and said, with a small sigh, “I suppose the next project would be to repaint the bedroom, but I'm really not looking forward to that.”

That was the strangest thing about her mother, Rusty thought. She could be all excited about engines that only came together in one particular way, but when given a chance to really go wild with creative ideas, she shied away from it. You could do anything with a wall. Rusty had learned some amazing things in art class lately.

“Mom, could I do it?” she asked, breathless with the potential of her idea. “Really do it, I mean, with... stuff? As a Christmas present?”

“I suppose,” Peggy said. A bit guiltily, she added, “I didn't mention it to make you do all the work. I can do it.”

“Yes, but I _want_ to do it,” Rusty said. “I have these great ideas! Except, you'd have to live in another room for a while, and not look at this one. Would that be okay?”

Peggy smiled. “Of course. I can't wait to see what you come up with.”

“I want to help, too,” Charlie piped up, not about to be left out of the whole thing.

“You bet,” Rusty said and kissed him on top of his tousled hair. “You and me together. What a team we'll make!”

* * *

Rusty wasn't the only one who opted for snow over class that day. Beth and Harry joined her and Charlie in the yard to make snowmen, while a few of the other kids decided to build a fort over by Pet's Corner.

After a while, there were many enough of them that Mr. Bellamy, the art teacher – Rusty could never bring herself to call him Tom – came out to watch them, the rest of the students in tow.

He scratched his beard and said, “It might be of some interest to you to know that Julian and I have switched lessons for today. This lesson is now art, and I'm at your service. The project of choice is yours, of course, and I will be here to help with anything you might need in ways of advice or material.”

The children cheered at that and welcomed in the newcomers, turning the yard into a swarming landscape of snow creatures and their homes.

One of the youngest kids, Aino, was making circles of snowballs that she stacked together into cylinders. "I will put candles in them in the evening," she explained. "They will be beautiful. My grandmother taught me how."

Rusty was very interested in seeing that, and might even have tried making one – it didn't look so hard – if Charlie hadn't tugged at her sleeve.

"I want to make a snow dog," he said.

A snow dog, four-legged? That was a bit beyond Rusty's experience, and she turned to the teacher.

"Mr. Bellamy, how would we go about making a snow dog?"

"I think you need to have it sitting down," he replied. "Or lying down would be even better. Then you just need a long sausage-shape, like this, with smaller ones for legs and tail, and a head."

"Oh, right!" she said. "And sitting, would I..."

"Front legs, behind, tail. That might be a little harder to tell from a snowman, unless you're very skilful."

Him saying it like that of course only made her want to _be_ skillful, and she grinned. "Okay, sitting dog it is!"

Would she dare to ask him about her mother's bedroom? It seemed like a good time for it.

"Uh, Mr. Bellamy, see, I'm doing this thing for my mother, for Christmas? I'm repainting her bedroom. And my ideas are kind of elaborate, but I can't quite figure out how to make them work. Do you think you could help me?"

"Absolutely!" he said. "Sounds interesting. Come by the art room after classes, and we'll see what we can cook up."

Thank you!" she said and returned, beaming, to her work with Charlie. "Come on, sport, let's see if we can make a retriever."

It took some doing, to get the snow into dog-shape, but she would not give up, and when she finally declared herself finished the snow dog was quite recognizably a retriever. Charlie had made a water bowl and bone for it, and inspired by the two, Beth was making a cat.

Rusty laughed at the sight. "Shouldn't the cat be more scared? It's only a few feet away from the dog."

Beth held up a spruce branch and waved it around. "What do you mean? It's terrified! Look at its tail."

"It's a second Pet's Corner," Charlie said with delight, looking around.

And so it was, Rusty discovered as she did the same. Among the snowmen, there were now a couple more snow dogs, some snow fish, a dinosaur, two snakes, and something that might have been snow chickens.

"Good job, everyone!" Mr. Bellamy called. "Those of you who need to finish, take your time. The rest of you, go inside, get warmed up, and I think Julian is ready to tell you a little something about Mary Stuart."

* * *

Even with her skirt dripping with melted snow, and her hands burning from the cold, Rusty sat beaming in the classroom for the rest of the schoolday. Not only had the snow sculptures ended up great, and made Charlie happy, but she had all sorts of brilliant ideas for the walls now. Speaking to Mr. Bellamy gave her even more, and she left school with notes and scribbles folded up in her pockets, and so many jars of paint that her mother had to help carry them to the car.

"Are you sure you need all this?" Peggy asked, alarmed. "It's just one little room."

"Oh, I won't use them all up," Rusty said. "Some of these are empty, anyway, I need them to mix up the paint, to get all the colours I want." Seeing her mother's expression, she said, "Mom, don't worry, I'm paying the school. Mr. Bellamy set it all up with the headmaster, and got me all of this from the caretaker's closet. It saves me the trouble of buying bucketloads of paints that I'm just going to use a little."

"It's not that," Peggy said. "But Rusty, just how many colours did you intend to paint the room?"

"Uh-uh," Rusty said with a smile. "That would be telling. You'll just have to trust me."

She sat down in the Bomb and watched the snowy landscape through the window as she waited for Peggy to join her. The silhuettes of snow sculptures were bathed in the flickering light of a candle, then another, and another, all shining through the cracks of Aino's snow lanterns. It was more beautiful than she would have expected, and she stared at them, mesmerized, trying to commit the colours to memory.

She would have liked to get started on the painting right away, but of course that wasn't possible. That evening, they cleaned and cleared the guest room where Peggy had stayed on her first visit. The next few days were spent moving all of the furniture and clothes over. Just as Rusty was ready to start tearing things down, Sunday came and Peggy expressly forbade her from doing it.

"But, Mom..." Rusty complained.

"No. We've been working for days. I am grateful for the idea, truly I am, but I want a quiet Sunday."

"I'm not going to make any noise. Scout's honor!"

"It can wait until tomorrow, Virginia," Peggy said, and her tone was such that Rusty shut her mouth, breathed out through her teeth, and stomped outside.

She kicked at the melting snow, now brown and full of pebbles, nothing like the morning it had first fallen. At least she had her sketches, to help her remember what it had looked like. And the large oak tree by the creek was still impressive, even with most of the snow gone, maybe she could put that in somewhere. She turned on her heel and rushed back inside, to fetch her pen and paper.

Two hours later, her fingers were numb and her behind was quickly going that way too, but the basic outline of the tree was committed to paper.

* * *

Charlie was adamant that he wanted to help. It was no problem at all, at first. "Sure thing," she told him and set him loose on the walls, showing him how to dampen them before you started tearing, and sand them afterwards. The only thing she wouldn't let him use was the knife, and he was okay with that. He was about as much hindrance as he was help, but having him around made her happier and more efficient, too.

The priming wasn't a problem either, but when she started transferring her drawings from graph paper to wall, she had to turn him down.

"I'm sorry, I need to do this part on my own."

"But I want to help," he said, his eyes welling up.

"Later, when I get back to painting. I promise! But this part is kind of sensitive."

"I can do it!" he shouted. "I can! I can! I can!"

She knew exactly what he was feeling, but that didn't change the facts of the matter. Nothing she said could console him, and in the end she had to carry him down to Peggy.

"Could you take him for a while?" she asked, trying to pry his fists away from her hair. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make him so upset, but I really do need to work alone on this."

"I understand," Peggy said. "He's a bit too small for all of this anyway."

"Am not!" Charlie mumbled, but he let his mother take him from Rusty's arms, and hid his sobbing face in the nape of her neck.

"We could go Christmas shopping," Peggy told the top of his head. "See if there's anything nice we can pick up for Rusty."

"I don't want to buy her anything. She's a meanie!"

Despite the harsh words, his sobs stopped, and he rubbed at his eyes.

"Thank you," Rusty said quietly.

Peggy smiled at her. "It's the least I can do. Now, go make all your ideas come true before you burst with them."

* * *

Transferring her drawings to the wall was _hard_ , and harder still when she had to decide how much of which colour went where. As she had been taught, she wrote each color in pencil on the wall before she got started, and found to her satisfaction that the miscalculations were very few and for the most part easily corrected.

She was so caught up in her work that she actually forgot about Charlie for two whole days after she could have brought him back in, and he was so used to the situation by then that he didn't nag her about it. It was only when she saw him at breakfast one morning, looking dejected and kicking at his chair leg, that she remembered.

"Charlie," she said. "This afternoon, you'll help me, right?"

The way he lit up at that made her feel guilty. "Really?"

"Yeah!" she said. "I need your help!"

And while that was a little white lie, she did find that the work was a lot more fun with Charlie around, even if she had to take time out of her creative flow to help him out, and even if she had to repaint some of the things he'd done. To her surprise, it didn't take all that much repainting. He was a quick study, for a five-year-old, and as long as she kept him on the easiest areas he did all right. Of course, he didn't have the kind of endurance she did, to be able to work through every free hour of the day. The only reason she ever went to bed at all was because the light was wrong in the evenings, and she spent a lot of post-bedtime hours doodling to herself before turning out the lights.

Two days before Christmas, they were finally finished.

"Remember," she said, giving Charlie a triumphant hug. "Don't tell Mom anything."

He shook his head solemnly and put a finger against his lips. "Shhh."

While he skipped down the stairs, she packed up the paints and took a last, long look at the room, before backing out of it and softly closing the door behind her.

Her marks would be taking another dip this term, but it was so very much worth it.

* * *

Christmas Day was rainy, but Rusty was in such high spirits that the drab weather could do nothing to affect it. As the hours progressed, she found herself more impatient even than Charlie, who kept nagging, ”Isn’t it evening soon? Mummy, what time is it? When’s the time for presents?”

She contemplated skipping ahead to the part where Peggy got to see the new bedroom, but that wouldn’t have been right. Waiting was part of Christmas, it always had been, and this wasn’t any different from being eight years old and wanting that new porcelain doll.

Peggy looked at her from time to time, not even bothering to hide her chuckles, and Rusty had to admit that it was pretty funny, even if it was torturous too.

She went to the choir concert in church, and traded presents with Beth and Harry, and cut paper into snowflakes with Charlie, and they sat down for a Christmas dinner that was still a little meager, but a lot better than last year in more ways than one.

All of it was enjoyable. Her first Christmas home, that was how it felt. Last year, at her grandmother’s house, everything had been so awkward and poisoned by the many quarrels. This was as it should be – she, Peggy, and Charlie, in Beatie’s Devon house. Though she silently apologized to the Omsks for the betrayal, this was everything she wanted.

Even so, she could hardly keep her feet still during dinner, and when they had cleared the table and Peggy declared, ”Well, I suppose it’s time for presents,” Rusty felt that she couldn’t wait another single second.

”Mom,” she said. ”Please. I want to be able to appreciate the presents right, and I know I can’t do that until you’ve seen the bedroom.”

Charlie started clapping his hands. ”Yes! Mummy, go see the bedroom! Do it now! Please?”

Peggy smiled. ”Well, I must admit that I’m curious. All right. Open my Christmas gift.”

”Great! Hang on!” Rusty ran out to the hallway to fetch a long scarf, which she wrapped around her mother’s eyes. ”Okay. Hold my hand, and don’t peek or turn around until I say.”

They walked together, slowly, to the bedroom, and Rusty pointed her towards the window and removed the blindfold.

”Okay, hold still,” she whispered.

Peggy looked at the wall, painted in a pale but warm yellow that drifted into light green on the left side and light red on the right. ”Well, it’s certainly very nice,” she said, puzzled, ”but…”

”Turn around.”

Peggy turned, and went absolutely still.

The base colour of the back wall was a faint blue, which had become snow in the twilight, with the darker sky above. In one corner was the dark silhouette of the gnarled oak tree, stretching through a deep purple sky to the reddish wall. In the other, snowdrops and scilla were raising their heads through the drifts. Inbetween, it was cold winter, with snow-clad spruces and pines, lights shining through windows of half-hidden buildings, and a couple of snow lanterns like Aino’s in the foreground, spreading their warm candle glow.

”Oh, Rusty, it’s beautiful,” she said.

”I helped!” Charlie said. ”I helped a lot.”

”It’s true, he did,” Rusty said, watching her mother’s face. Yes, it seemed like Peggy actually did like it, and hadn't just said she did because of parental obligation. That was encouraging, and she grinned. ”Here’s what I thought. The green wall is the spring wall, the yellow is summer, and the red is fall. Sorry, autumn. I could paint you one wall for Easter, one for Midsummer and one for, well, Halloween maybe. Though perhaps not with so many ghosts, in a bedroom. Of course, that would mean moving in and out a lot, and you wouldn’t properly get to settle in until next year. So if you prefer, we could just leave it as is. I’d really like to at least make the summer wall, though. The way I figured, I could frame the window with sunlit trees, so no matter what kind of weather it is outside, you’ll always have that summer image when you look out. I could do that now, if you’d like, but I don’t know, it would feel like cheating.”

Peggy didn’t reply, just stared at the wall, which made Rusty feel nervous.

”So, what do you think?” she asked.

”I think…” Peggy said, pulling her daughter close. ”I think I have a most amazingly talented daughter – and son,” she added, putting her other arm around Charlie. ”Please, do it as you planned it. It will be marvellous. I shall have the bedroom of a queen. In fact, it will be my sanctum.”

Rusty grimaced, remembering her father and his study. ”Does that mean no one else is allowed in here?”

”I’d say it’s a sanctum just large enough for three,” Peggy said and kissed her hair. ”Wouldn’t you?”

”And Teddy!” Charlie said.

”That’s right.” Peggy lifted him up so she could hug both children at once, and Rusty too wrapped one arm around Charlie, and one around Peggy. ”Three and Teddy.”

So many emotions bubbled up inside Rusty that she could barely restrain herself from bursting into tears. Instead, she said, softly, "Okay, let's get back to the sitting room. I want to see my presents."


End file.
